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Mexican

08/02/2012

This is a variation on the Chicken Green Enchiladas I wrote about recently. Rather than roll up the enchiladas I wanted to try stacking them, almost lasagne style, to make a dish that sits up on the plate more.

07/02/2012

An American friend of mine was kind enough to share this recipe for Chicken Green Enchiladas with me. They are easy to make and the taste is phenomenal.

There are 2 ingredients in the recipe that are not that common in UK supermarkets: Monterey Jack cheese (I managed to get some from my local Sainsbury's cheese counter) and tomatillos (I buy these from specialist retailers like MexGrocer UK.

23/01/2012

This recipe came about through luck and experimentation. I had followed a recipe for confit duck legs that were flavoursome, succulent, and fell off the bone. It got me thinking that rather than slow roasting pork shoulder for use as pulled pork or taco meat, I could maybe try to confit it . I found a joint of what I thought was pork shoulder at the back of the freezer and thought it would be a great candidate for the test.

09/12/2011

Enchiladas generally consist of corn tortillas wrapped around a filling and then topped with a spicy sauce and cheese. There are many variations: in parts of Texas they stack the tortillas, you can have many different fillings, you can have green sauce rather than red sauce..

..and you can knock them up in the UK on a cold winter's evening and cross your fingers that your enchilada recipe is a good one. They were certainly tasty but I'm hoping some of my American friends will comment on this recipe to help me to improve it in future.

18/11/2011

I just put these three chile vodkas together using chiles that I have smoked and dried myself.

From left to right we have: red chipotle vodka, jalapeno and habanero vodka, and green chipotle vodka. They might be used as Xmas presents or, just as likely, I might keep them until my birthday on New Year's Eve to use as spicy shots.

I only put them together a couple of minutes before these photos were taken and you can see that the vodka is already starting to take on the colour of the chiles.

I bought a wild rabbit and a couple of pheasants last weekend, with the intention of smoking them and using them to make posh tacos. I'll deal with the smoking in a separate article and concentrate on the creation of the smoked rabbit tacos here.

15/11/2011

Last week I was invited to the Waitrose Cookery School in London to take part in a Mexican Challenge organised by Discovery Foods and Benito's Hat restaurant.

The evening consisted of a cookery demonstration by Felipe Cruz, the head chef of Benito's hat, followed by a 30 minute Mexican Challenge to cook a mexi inspired dish based on a range of provided ingredients. I'll post more about the 2 dishes Felipe made in a future article and concentrate on my hastily improvised Pipian Mole Verde here.

As it was a hectic, improvisational cooking session I'm going to wander away from my usual Ingredients => Method recipe format and give a kind of running commentary on how the dish came together and then list the ingredients & show a photo of the dish at the end.

04/11/2011

It's nearly Bonfire Night when, according to my 7 year old son, we celebrate the burning of Adolf Hitler. When prompted with "No, it's to commemorate the burning of Guy... ..who?" he then amended his answer to "What, the chef? Guy Fieri? Why did we burn him?".

Anyway, this evening we're going to a fireworks display and one of my friends asked if there was anything spicy and warming I could make to take along. One of our group is a vegetarian and another is gluten intolerant so I came up with the idea of making this Mexican style Black Bean and Chipotle soup.